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In this episode, Paul and Dave riff about how a school offering vocational training could use Shortcut Blogging as a tool for developing expert content via their instructors.
Here’s the problem: If a vocational training instructor wanted to be a writer, that’s what he or she would be doing. Likewise, if a marketer wanted to be an expert at auto body work, he or she wouldn’t be a writer.
As a former recruiter and marketer for a community college vocational department, Dave found out first hand how difficult it was to get technical instructors to participate in the development of marketing content. Many marketers have run into a similar wall. For example, the illustration used in this post is a screenshot of the Wyotech blog. Wyotech is a national leader in automotive technology training. They seem to have started a blog back in 2009. They haven’t posted to it in 2 years. By the way, you have to go back to November of 2009 to find a blog post that isn’t entirely composed of Twitter updates. It was their first and only real blog post.
We don’t mean to be critical of them. This is an all-to-common fate for blogs that started out as a tool of well-meaning marketers. The problem is that the marketer is not the content expert and there is almost no way to get an expert mechanic to become a writer. HOWEVER….have you ever asked a question of an expert mechanic? Ask them a difficult mechanical question and they light up and your only difficulty will be getting them to stop talking. It’s the perfect scenario for Shortcut Blogging.
Any vocational education program that uses the methodology developed by Shortcut Blogging will soon be way ahead of the pack when it comes to producing quality, expert-level podcasts and articles. The reason? We can use the actual instructors to provide the raw material in the form of podcasts. By originating the copy via expert-interviews, we shine the spotlight on the true stars of any program…the instructors.
Enjoy the podcast!